Convergence & Collaboration: What It Means for Your IT and Marketing Departments

The nature of marketing has changed as technology has evolved. More and more individuals use their smartphones and other mobile devices as their primary source for news and information and this trend does not appear to be changing anytime soon. In several countries, including the United States, Russia and Japan, the number of mobile subscriptions exceeds the populations of the respective country.

Why is it important for your business to understand the convergence of your information technology (IT) department with your marketing area? Consider the amount of data that is being viewed, shared and uploaded via the 4.1 billion mobile devices currently in use as of 2013. Data traffic is currently at 18 exabytes, with one exabyte equivalent to one billion gigabytes. By the end of 2018, the amount of mobile data traffic is expected to increase more than 10 fold to 190 exabytes or the equivalent of 4 trillion, 4 minute video clips.

The Emergence of Mobile and Social Media Marketing

More and more marketing efforts are moving from traditional marketing to new media, such as social media and content marketing. Your efforts to expand your market reach can only be accomplished by understanding where your customers are and how they best receive information. The numbers more than suggest that the growth of mobile devices and the ever changing social media landscape requires companies like yours to create campaigns and marketing efforts that are specifically designed for the growing online community, and can be delivered in a form that has the potential to reach the largest possible audience—in other words, via mobile ads or notifications.

The Collaborative Effort of IT and Marketing

Collaboration between IT and marketing must take place in recognition of the paradigm shift from traditional to new marketing. This collaboration should involve gaining a greater understanding of the new media technologies as they are introduced and evolve and find ways to best exploit these technologies to your advantage. Marketing professionals can develop copy, create ad campaigns, write blog postings and provide valuable information in order to motivate a customer to take action. IT professionals can take this data and create web pages, interactive customer sites and help measure the effectiveness of your company’s overall marketing efforts through reporting functions and other metrics built in the technologies you use to reach mobile users.

Merging the Roles of CIOs and CMOs

It is important to invest your energy, time and efforts in determining how best to get your company’s Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) together and on the same page. Research indicates that more companies are finding ways to merge the previously siloed roles of CMO and CIO into new chief technologist positions and digital CMOs as a way to show the constant blurring of the once-distinct positions. Creating collaboration between these areas should help your company take the next step into digital marketing.